BRAZIL- Campo Grande, Foz Do Iguacu, Florianopolis and Curitiba

RAINBOW!?

We arrived at the border town at around 6am. Unfortunately for us, we had indeed been fibbed to, and had to get ourselves a taxi to the actual border, which ended up with us sharing with an Australian couple and being charged 4x what we’d been expecting. Additionally, the border itself didn’t open for another hour or so. Leave Bolivia on a high!

On the plus side, we got talking to the couple, who were also on their South American honeymoon, and he was Brazilian, which turned into a godsend for trying to get by initially. It was only once we entered a country where we didn’t speak the language at all we realised just how much Spanish we could understand. On paper, it’s got a lot of similarities to Spanish (with a lot more accents around the letters), but the actual pronunciation couldn’t have felt more foreign, like a sort of Spanish-Russian hybrid. I pretty much just learned how to say ‘Do you have ...’ and “I don’t speak Portuguese, a little Spanish” and gave up from there. The rest of my time we just shouted Spanish words at people and hoped for the best. The first couple of days however, we just hid behind our new friend, who hadn’t spoken Portuguese in so long he was happy to do so. Suited us…!

The guy at the border seemed to have it in for me from the start. I had no idea what he was asking, so our friend translated for me and I replied as best I could in both English and Spanish. Apparently not good enough, he repeated things over and over until he was actually shouting, eventually having the same conversation with our friend directly and stamping my passport. Everyone else just got their stamps in silence, so I’m not quite sure what I did wrong. This could be fun…

Unfortunately the border crossing took long enough that we weren’t able to get the 10am bus we’d planned on. Our tickets were at least valid for any bus that day, so we booked the next, which wasn’t until 3pm. We adjusted our clocks an hour forward as we were aware Brazil was an hour ahead of Bolivia, and made the most of our time, finding a self service restaurant to eat as much as possible in a petrol station. We didn’t really have a lot more option, it was Easter Sunday and as such were glad we had found anything at all.

Great view of the other guys washing their hands

Little bit of proof reading wouldn't go amiss

We headed back to the bus station in good time, and soon wondered if any of the buses were running on time. It was 3pm, and the 2pm bus had only just showed up. 30 minutes later, the 2.30pm bus arrived, and we figured that if this was the case our bus would be at least an hour late. Sure enough, exactly an hour late our bus turned up. That’s when we realised that only part of Brazil was an hour ahead, here, we didn’t need to adjust the time. Thank god we’d adjusted that way around or we’d have been a little stuck…

By the time we arrived in Campo Grande it was pretty late, about 11pm. This was only a planned short stop, we didn’t have a lot of time to spend in Brazil and didn’t think there was much to do here, so arranged our tickets to leave the next day. Ours would be a sleeper bus late the following day, our friends had an early bus, so we took advantage of the translation and got our bus tickets sorted before we’d be sent out on our own to try and work out the country ourselves.

We had planned to visit a park in the city to kill some of the day, but the weather had other ideas, so found ourselves lunch in a rodizio. This was a challenge as we didn’t have a single word of Portuguese mastered, so we soon found ourselves resorting to my phone to translate. He told us Portuguese was the most difficult language in the world. I’m not sure it is, perhaps our lack of any knowledge of it made it a little difficult, but I suspect Mandarin or Khmer would be a little more challenging. Half way through the meal I asked if they had coffee. He looked at me with a face like I’d just asked him to take a shit on the table, so I figured my attempt at Portuguese failed, but promptly returned with two little coffees (with some sort of alcohol in them). He then scuttled off to tell his colleagues of the revolting habits we were into, making strange faces at us from afar. The shame.

After that, we just grabbed some stuff from the supermarket and relaxed in the hostel. A bit of a waste of the day, but they did have puppies, so everything was fine really.

Pup!

Pups!

PUP!

PUUUUUPS!

The overnight bus wasn’t luxurious but sufficient, and we found ourselves in Foz do Iguacu. Roads in Brazil so far were a lot better maintained and a lot less zigzaggy, so that was a plus. We hopped out and found a local bus towards the centre. The town itself was a lot nicer than anticipated, although it is a huge tourist attraction so shouldn’t have come as a big surprise. Our plan here wasn’t actually to visit the Brazilian side at all, but get a bus over to Argentina and see there as everyone had told us it was a lot more impressive. The area was a little confusing, as it was a border to the three countries of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Local buses had signs on them indicating which country they went to, which was fortunate as we had no idea what anything else said, and meant that Spanish was a viable language in the area. For now, we could just about communicate.

The next day we got up early, and hopped on a bus to Argentina. Simple enough, the bus for some reason drove straight through Brazilian border control and only stopped on the Argentinian side. We got our stamps and our 90 day visas, for our 6 hour stop over. We were dropped at a bus stop specifically for the bus to the entrance to the falls, where a taxi offered to take 4 of us for the same price the bus ticket would have been, so we were off on our way.

The park itself was split into a few different areas, the easiest way to get around being two trains. You take a ticket for free that tells you which group you are in, so then you don’t have to queue, just be at the station at the right time. We took a ticket but it all seemed pretty dead, and hopped on the train to the first stop. Here we found where everyone was, waiting for the next train to go to the main event, ‘garganta del diablo’, or the throat of the devil. We grabbed a ticket and killed half an hour looking at the coatis and giving them random personalities and voices, as you do.

Toot toot!

WHATCHA GOT?!

Yo yo, we gonna need some a dat.

WAZZZZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPP!?

Eventually the train arrived and we headed off to the stop point, where it was a further 20 minute walk to the ‘throat’. And crowds. Very impressive, but also extremely busy, and with all the spray chucked up by the waterfalls you were soaked pretty quickly. Very hard to get a decent photo too!

Wet

Soggy

Not pictured - noisy!

Sneekin up on us

Water in a falling motion

We headed back to the last stop where there were two walks, an upper and lower circuit giving different views of various waterfalls in the area. We started with the upper circuit, pausing for a few minutes to have lunch whilst keeping an eye out for potential thieves in the area. A bird decided to watch us for most of the event, but not so fortunate as to receive anything. Some good waterfall and rainbow views to be seen, before we headed down to the lower circuit.

Say AHHHHH

Now stick out your tongue..

Got any sarnies?!

.. or perhaps just a minute to talk about our lord and savior Jesus Christ!?

Opportunist

Diana next to a large river of chocolate

We’d seen plenty of warning signs around notifying us that we should be careful of the coatis and monkeys in the region. As we approached the start of the lower circuit, we finally found the monkeys, which were jumping from tree to tree with such vigour that one knocked a branch down, landing on someones head and breaking into several pieces (the branch, not the head). We moved on a little swifter. Eventually we found our way down to the lower circuit, where everything was significantly damper, especially the end of it where we walked to a walkway practically under a waterfall.

Butterflies all over the damn place

Hypnotic patterns

Mum and baby, mission impossible style

Bigggggggg

Jungly

Sneaky rainbow

Damp place to be.

That was it for Argentina (again), and the end of us being able to speak Spanish and get away with it. We headed back to Foz do Iguacu, and worked out how we’d move on from there. Our next stop was a considerable distance away, Florianopolis. We decided a night bus would be the easiest, getting us in at a reasonable 9am or so the next day.

It took us a while to establish the best way to get the bus to the main bus terminal. Bus terminals here seemed to be separated into local and national, with the national being called the ‘Rodoviaria’, probably the only word we learnt in our entire experience as it was needed fairly frequently. Fortunately, the people were helpful, pointing us to the right platforms to get a bus there. The buses were less helpful, or at least, less frequent than we’d hoped, and once traffic was taken into account, we only actually arrived there about 30 mins early. Time we needed to actually buy the ticket (and hope there was still space), and wolf down something vaguely dinnery. We were told there would be a dinner stop, but it wouldn’t be until something silly like 1am, when we would rather just sleep.

The bus was, to say the least, uncomfortable. The seats barely reclined, were hard and small. Luckily it had barely anyone on it, so we managed to grab double seats for ourselves and could spread out, but there wasn’t a single part of the experience that I’d like to relive. Especially the rude awakening at something silly AM in order to eat something.

Whatcha reckon these are? Boring, regular cheerios, right? Wrong. Bacon cheerios. Bacon.

Eventually we arrived and walked from the national bus station to the local bus station, headed to our accommodation. The only information we had was that people had said the host was extremely friendly, catering to anything they wanted, but very little about the room itself. We’d booked a double room, which, shortly after checking in, we were handed a phone with a google translation asking if we’d mind sharing it as it had extra beds in it and some people couldn’t find another place to stay that night, in return we’d have a discount. Feeling somewhat like we didn’t have a lot of options, we agreed. We regretted it, that night they were playing music at full volume in the kitchen next door at about 11pm when we were trying to sleep. Around 11.30 when we’d just about dozed off, there was a knock on the door, followed by a Brazilian woman who only spoke Portuguese barging through, turning the light on and shouting ‘FISH?!’ at us in an attempt to share their dinner with us. A lovely kind gesture, only tainted by the small issue of us sleeping and definitely not wanting fish at that moment in time. And the guy snored like a chainsaw. Not the relaxing night we needed after a long, crappy overnight bus.

The place itself though was located nicely. We were a short walk from the town, which had all manner of expensive restaurants and touristy tat shops. We took this time to work out a game plan for the next few days, we wanted to get to Rio but didn’t like the sound of the 24+ hour bus to do so. Instead, we looked into flights and found that we could fly in about 3 days time for practically the same cost, a little more once you added the bags, so it seemed a no brainer.

The room itself was about 4 steps from the beach, where the following morning we watched a guy fishing and a big net, which excited the local bird wildlife no end as inevitably he’d drop some fish and they’d attempt to flounder their way back to the sea. Interesting to watch, but we couldn’t do another night of it. The island has something in the region of 42 beaches, so we packed up and headed off further north to a different town, about an hour away by bus. Big island!

Peaceful enough!

Just to the left of the net you can see some bird food escaping away

We weren’t sure exactly what to expect from our next accommodation. We’d opted for a self-contained apartment, however it also said it included breakfast, which wasn’t like anything we’d had before. Sure enough, we arrived and found it was a block of apartments with a little cafe area downstairs, and more than comfortable enough compared to the last two nights, about 3 minutes walk from the beach. We were a little annoyed now that we’d booked the flight and had a bit of a race against time, as it would have been nice to relax here a day longer, but not the case unfortunately.

Our next stop was Curitiba, where we needed to go for it’s very convenient airport. Only a few hours away, we made our way to the rodoviaria and ended up getting a ticket for a bus about 3pm, which meant we’d be arriving a bit later than we’d hoped. Indeed, we arrived about 6pm, and being Sunday, everything in the area was closed (and dark, it gets dark super early around here!), leaving our only food option to be a hotdog stand with a woman who spoke only the essential words of English. That being ‘Bread, cheese, ketchup’… You get the jist. Everything else was shut, even the local Maccy D’s wasn’t in operation at this hour. Didn’t leave us with a lot of option!

The city itself was okay, we’d given ourselves a day to see it, and our flight would require us being up at about 5am the morning after so didn’t leave us much time to do anything in the evening. Of course, the day we had available was a Monday, which apparently is actually even less useful than a Sunday, with almost all tourist attractions and museums being closed. We saw a few things though, explored the streets, had some more all-you-can-eat self service food (only about 3 quid each this time!) and set off first thing in the morning, on to the most well known place in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro.

Entrance to the botanical gardens

Garden surrounded by city